"New" Music Log

[Todd A]

One joy of this Requiem survey is the number of new to me composers I am encountering, like Thierry Huillet. A pianist composer in the mold of the great Fazil Say, he has recorded a decent amount as a pianist, has won competitions, teaches, and does the things so many other contemporary composers do. So maybe this dude can deliver another knockout Requiem with a different sound. You see, this Requiem is scored for two sopranos and strings. It starts with appealingly wordless vocalizing, before the strings arrive, and they evoke some darkness. But then the pattern of the work is established. Beautiful singing soaring over almost constantly lyrical string writing. Huillet mixes things up and with no little frequency peppers the string writing with nice dissonances, but of the loveliest type. Indeed, the pared down forces almost cannot help but sound beautiful. In the continuous Dies Irae and Tuba Mirum, some edgy scruffiness is introduced in the form of what amounts to Schreienstimme, but that just emphasizes and does not terrify. In the Agnus Dei, Huillet summons sounds quite reminiscent of Bartók’s Divertimento. Overall, this is quite the nice, modernist, French Requiem. Not a towering masterpiece, but something to revisit with no compunction. Huillet and the record label also provide the listener with a brief encore in the form of a Prelude for Viola and String Orchestra. It’s a heckuva an encore. Ample tension, tasty dissonance, and drama pervade. The very brief piece most definitely leaves the listener wanting more. That’s the way to do it.

Playing, singing, and sound are all up to contemporary standards.


(This was originally misposted in another thread.)

 

[Todd A]

Here’s a two out of three new composer disc. Alfred Desenclos and Pierre Villette are both new to me, though Poulenc very much is not. Both Desenclos and Villette are 20th Century composers who do not appear to have written much in the way of frequently played works in the concert and recital halls of the world, but they seem to have known their business on the basis of this recording.

Desenclos’ Messe de Requiem, dating from 1963, sounds entirely unlike what one would think a work from that year would sound like. It’s a thirty-six-minute setting for organ and chorus, thus evoking the type of sound that has been used for Requiems for a few centuries now. It is influenced by music going all the way back to chant, but it more resembles the gentle, gorgeous – and I mean gorgeous – style one associates with Faure and Durufle. The extent one enjoys this may depend on how much one enjoys organ music, which is very well done, but the choral writing is at times so sumptuously and achingly and romantically beautiful, with such bewitching harmonies, that one nearly melts into a puddle of spiritual goo. For me, I see it as a Faure- Ešenvalds mashup, though it does not ascend to the highest heights of either, nor does it sound like either. This piece sounds both hyper-conservative and radical given its composition year, and it constitutes a spectacular find. I am completely certain that some people would hear this and think of it as a snoozefest, but there you go.

Three Villette and then and then two Desenclos a capella pieces follow. All display similar degrees of beauty as the Requiem, though scaled down. The disc closes out with Poulenc’s Litanies à la vierge noire de Rocamadour, which includes organ. More dissonant and modern than the other composers’ works, it, too beguiles. I have Dutoit’s version, so an A/B, while not needed, could be fun.

Singers and organists do superb work. This recording is so fine that I suspect I shall buy it. It’s just over an hour of transportive beauty, a respite from the violence and propaganda and unyielding noise of the world.

Magnifique.

 

[Alex S]

Thanks, I enjoyed that.

 

[Todd A]

So, like, I ain’t a fan of harps. Never have been. I don’t hate harps, I just don’t really care for them, and I have never sought out a recording including harp. I mention this because this recording relies heavily on the harp. The harp remains the only constant accompaniment for all songs, with a flute and duduk alternately adding more color and contrast for Ms Bayrakdarian in this collection of twenty-nine Armenian songs for children. It turns out that for this recording and this music, the harp is the thing. It’s needed and only it would suffice to help augment the soprano’s singing.

And that singing is some of the most mesmerizing, beautiful, touching, and moving I’ve ever heard. This is the small-scale, intimate companion to Joyous Light. Bayrakdarian may very well offer this recording as a learning aid to her voice students, so perfectly realized is the execution. Every syllable, every note, every inflection is both obviously thought out and delivered with deep emotional involvement and spontaneity. That is to say, the singing is perfect. That’s all deafeningly obvious even before reading the liner notes. Some of these songs have been sung in her family for generations, stretching back to her ancestors’ history in the old country. Her mother sang some of these songs to her as an infant, just as she did for her children, to whom she dedicates this recording. The selections include songs that survived with her family, who lived through the Armenian Genocide, thus magnifying their significance. The songs themselves come from the well-known Gomidas Vartabed (aka, Komitas), and his less well-known students Parsegh Ganatchian and Mihran Toumajan, and some traditional folk songs are included as well. Every single song captivates, and for me the Ganatchian songs probably stand out as the most meltingly beautiful and affecting.

This recording was very much a passion project for Ms Bayrakdarian, who made sure to include Armenian language lyrics. A map of the Ottoman Empire at the start of the 20th Century is included, along with reference to the cities represented in the selected songs. WaPo writer David Ignatius and his sister Sarah penned the intro. Bayrakdarian also included family photos with her children, godchildren, and one of her as an infant with her namesake great-grandmother. The seriousness and devotion here is beyond question.

This is one of the greatest vocal recital recordings I’ve ever heard. It equals Joyous Light.

A purchase of the century.

 

[Todd A]

I won’t lie, this recording of Vyacheslav Artyomov’s Requiem caught my eye because of the nifty cover image. Marketing works. I perused the Wikipedia article for the composer, and the things that stuck out are his background in physics and the fact that he was blacklisted. That latter fact may help explain why his Requiem, penned in the 80s, is dedicated To the Martyrs of Long-suffering Russia. Maybe not. Whatever the case, this modern work seemed to demand attention.

An organ blast followed quickly by choral outpouring starts things off in an intense, dark, at times eerie, and almost constantly dissonant fashion. These traits never completely abate, nor do what sound to me like Eastern Orthodox musical traditions, but I could be wrong on that one. What seems even more evident is the influence of Gubaidulina and Ligeti on his style. Indeed, some of the passages sound so much like Ligeti, that it triggered a (false) sense of musical déjà vu. I mean this as the highest possible compliment. The blending of soloists, chorus, orchestra, and organ is so seamless, so smooth, with such unerringly well executed transitions, that the massive work just flows along, one potent idea to the next. Some of the compositional devices might sound trite on their own and in a different context, but not here. And then there are some unique things. The disorienting undulating sound of the Offertorium followed by the purposely wobbly (and maybe electronically distorted) singing in the Sanctus bring something new to the genre, at least in my listening experience. The two-part Libera Me has a massive, rumbling organ underpinning the chorus in the first half, and a great orchestral lament to open the second half that really hits the spot. The work concludes with an In Paradisum that starts with a Messiaenesque blob of birdcall accentuated by obtrusively closely recorded percussion before swelling into a grandiose, almost indistinct wall of sound with chorus, before returning to a lighter, bird call infused cloud of ethereal goodness. Yeah, just yeah.

No less than Dimitri Kitaenko conducts the work, and he does a rather fine job, as do the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the soloists, and the two choirs. Excellent sound rounds out a fine recording. I will have to explore more Artyomov, and based on this and the Kastalsky Requiem, I may have to explore more liturgical music in the Russian and Eastern Orthodox traditions.

 

[Todd A]

Yuja Wang playing bespoke music. Both the great Michael Tilson Thomas and his protégé Teddy Abrams wrote a piece for Wang to play and record for DG to fulfill contractual obligations. One work travels better than the other. I'll start there. MTT's You Come Here Often? is a light, bright, breezy, jazzy good time of an encore. Filled with ample notes and virtuosic passages, it allows Wang to strut her formidable stuff. I suspect she'll use it as an encore for quite some time. She should.

Wang's pal Teddy Abrams, director of the Louisville Orchestra which he conducts here, penned the eleven-movement, nearly forty-minute Piano Concerto to showcase his writing and her playing. The piece opens with a big and beefy and very big band sounding intro before moving on to the first of four cadenzas. The piece mostly sounds like an abstracted pastiche. Some musical quotations can be heard, but mostly it's jazz, show tunes, movie soundtracks, rock and pop music, and generic classical forms and periods that move in and out of earshot. Abrams has an ear for orchestration, but the music doesn't really work for me. Except for those cadenzas. The big one is the second one, which is the fifth movement, and which serves as the literal center of the piece. It's a showstopper, with Wang blazing away in grand and grandiose fashion, with old-fashioned romantic playing that smacks a bit of Rachmaninoff in a few places. As Wang dispatches everything with seeming ease, one hears just why she can and does deliver such kick-ass Prokofiev. She can make gnarly and dissonant sound dead simple and attractive, and she can dispatch notes as fast and nimbly as anyone, ever. The subsequent cadenzas also work exceptionally well, too. Which makes sense.

Playing and sound and such are all fine, but it's hard to see paying for a barely over forty-minute recording just to pick up a worthwhile encore. Streaming will suffice.

Now, hopefully, Ms Wang returns to more satisfying fare for her next recording.

 

[Todd A]

Nancy Galbraith is entirely new to me, something I feel just a tad embarrassed about. An American composer, and the Chair of Composition at Carnegie Mellon, she has been cranking out hits since the days when Elton John and John Denver ruled the airwaves. Somewhat like Haskell Small, she is a regional artist, which on evidence of this recording is something of a shame. But then, there are multiple recordings of her works, so that is a plus.

Jumping in, Galbraith’s Requiem expertly blends the bold and the beautiful. Nary a rough edge is to be heard most of the time. Certainly, the Requiem Aeternam sounds softly beautiful start to finish, with the percussion adding color and not bite. The Dies Irae offers a contrast. Rhythmically snappy, with what sounds like hints of Revueltas thrown in (!), Galbraith employs emphatic, insistent, repetitive chant in the opening, with the intensity appropriate to the context, but then she has the music fade away to something more beautiful. The Tuba Mirum comes off as theatrical and almost movie soundtracky, but in a less derivative way than prior entries in this survey. Were it to show up in a film, a Darren Aronofsky film would not be out of the question. The work sort of bubbles along, never sounding harsh, and sometimes, as in the Ingemisco, the combo of strings, voices, and discreetly deployed winds really tickles the ear. And the Lacrimosa really soothes in its gentler than Faure beauty. I will admit to some misgivings with the Offertorium, with its Coplandesque use of percussion, but that seems a tradeoff worth making. Galbraith ends with a Libera Me that sounds tender, gentle, and ethereally beautiful. This Requiem is not hard-hitting and intense and captivating like some of the others in this survey, and it does not rise to the level of Faure or Durufle when it comes to overall gentler takes, and it does not need to, but it displays disparate influences and styles and sounds fresh and modern, but also accessible. Nice.

The Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh and Academy Chamber Orchestra do the do well enough, and conductor Robert Page leads his commission for his final performance as music director of choir nicely. Recorded sound is efficient rather than resplendent. I should like it if bigger names and labels and engineers took up the cause of the work. I will also throw in one piece of criticism: Ms Galbraith’s webpage needs some serious work.

 

[Todd A]

Revisiting the Quatour Diotima’s Second Viennese School recordings prompted me to hear them in lesser known fare. For no particular reason, Conrado del Campo got selected. Campo is one of those super-obscure composers who wrote a goodly amount, taught, and then vanished, at least from a distant recording consumer’s standpoint. Among his output is either thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen string quartets, depending on internet source. This recording purports to be the beginning of a complete cycle.

The recording opens with the Fifth, titled Caprichos Románticos, and the title most assuredly fits. The work, from 1908, possesses a sort of fin de siècle groove I associate with Zemlinksy or early Schoenberg. All six movements are slow, all gorgeous, with nary an ugly note to be heard. The music is not tuneful in the Dvořákian manner, but everything here falls easily, seductively, languidly on the ears. One can hear a variety of influences from the late romantic era, but Campo does sound unique in his ability to deliver so much beautiful slowness up until the more animated ending of the nearly thirteen minute final movement. The only other quartets I am readily familiar with that pull off this feat are Haydn’s Seven Last Words and DSCH 15, and those works are very different, indeed. The two minute Third, titled Cuarteto castellano and also from 1908, also sounds mostly slow, but it is more unabashedly romantic, with long phrases, rich harmonics, dramatic dynamic swells. The first movement nearly tips into over-the-top syrupy excess, and it hits the spot while doing so. Forget academic rigor and ideological composition, this is straight for the heart stuff. Yeah. The second movement backs off a bit, but not much. One could never describe this work as being classical or Apollonian in demeanor. I had no expectations going in, and this recording really delivers the goods.

The Diotima acquit themselves beautifully, some audible effort notwithstanding. The fact that these are live performances may contribute to that. Hopefully, all the quartets get recorded, and hopefully the Diotima get to do the honors. An unexpected delight.

 

[Todd A]

As Wallace Shawn might say, it was inconceivable that I would not listen to Schnittke in this survey. Indeed, I myself am surprised it took me this long to get to his Requiem.

The recording starts off with the a capella Concerto for Choir. This is late Schnittke, from 1990, and it is a straight up conservative work, strictly tonal and melodic, with at times dense vocal harmonies. The ancient texts are treated very seriously indeed. Only in a few, fleeting passages can one maybe hear Schnittke’s music personality. I don’t know the Russian choral tradition, so if someone were to have claimed that this was penned two or three centuries ago, or maybe even more, I would not have disbelieved such a claim. It’s compactness and attractiveness work quite well.

The main work sounds more like Schnittke, though not as wild and crazy as his symphonies. Part of that is because it does sound deadly serious. The work includes an organ that is present most of the time, occasionally dominating the proceedings with heavy bass notes, and sometimes doubling the low voices nicely. Angular piano playing makes multiple appearances, as do blatting brass and various bells and other percussion instruments, including a drum kit. The composer evokes a more modernist soundworld at times, and some almost eerie, more ancient sounding music, and while expressive, it is kept under wraps most of the time. Overall, this is tamer than I thought it would be going in, but it does work as written.

All performers do good work, and sound is pretty good, though not at all SOTA.

 

[Todd A]

This here twofer’s a gimmick. German violinist Niklas Liepe, along with his keyboardist brother Nils, teamed up with composer Andreas Tarkmann to record rearranged versions of the opening and closing arias and thirteen variations of Bach's timeless Goldberg Variations. Interspersed throughout the set are eleven new, small works by eleven composers, with Tarkmann including one of his own. You know, this is not a bad gimmick. It’s also one Liepe did in his earlier recording for Sony Germany of Paganini’s music. Sony Germany is nearly as adventurous as some French micro-labels and Japanese home market labels. That's a good thing.

The lengthy collection (95 minute+) starts with a gorgeous as all get out, slow, not at all HIP inspired Aria where both Liepes strut their stuff. Then the first variation basically sounds like a missing movement from a Brandenburg Concerto. Indeed, every time rearranged Bach shows up, it very much inhabits a similar sound world, occasionally tipping over into a scaled-up string trio feel, as designed. The arrangement of the twenty-fifth variation does stand out as more potent than most, and it acts as a perfect bridge between the new pieces that flank it. As Bach arrangements go, every track sounds quite good. But that wasn’t the main draw for me. The new stuff was. And so, here goes:

Rolf Rudin’s Dialog With Bach, a Goldberg Reflection sounds like a blend of 19th Century romanticism and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, with some very beautiful high register playing for violin. Sidney Corbet’s Goldberg Hallucination Remix is a stylistically familiar work, where avant garde, nearly shapeless string music gets interrupted by identifiable but distorted quotations from the main work in question. It’s a quasi-pastiche, and it works quite well. It reminds me of a compact, more abstract, and obviously Bach-inspired work akin to Luciano Berio’s Rendering. Tarkman’s Goldberg’s Last Summer introduces piano into the mix, sounding very Roremesque when the piano gets played, and it retains some of that feel, as well as acquiring a dramatic movie soundtrack quality as the music sounds unabashedly tuneful and beautiful. Dominick Dieterle’s Sleepless After JS Bach starts with eerie high strings and pizzicato, first from the soloist, and then the low strings, as the energy picks up, before winding down to a slow, quiet conclusion. Wolf Kerscheck’s Goldberg Reflections Aria sounds like a transcription fit for Barry Lyndon to start before turning into something that Mark O’Connor might write, and then morphs into a jazzy soundtrack style sound before returning to the opening material in a mini-cyclic piece.

Moritz Eggert’s Four Variations from Goldberg Spielt, with the 2000 work revised in 2019 for this project, starts off achingly beautiful and old-fashioned, but then morphs into unabashedly modern music before shifting to something more akin to post-war writing. Hartmann again pops up as a useful analog. Daniel Sundy gets four tracks to cover some New Goldberg Variations, and all have a jazzy, swing influence and sound. Tobias Rokahr’s Sleepless (Goldberg Goes Crazy) lives up to its title. Frenetic, tense, fast, edgy, tetchy, it blends in the most fleeting moments of beauty and the main theme with in-your-face chaos – and that’s just the first minute. It then slows, gets all eerie, with horror movie mishmash in the mix, and the music turns basically silent, before popping back to life, with unnervingly peppy harpsichord playing leading the way. It’s quite possibly the best of the new pieces here. Friedrich Heinrich Kern’s Reflections on a Dream combines strings with the Verrophone, which makes its first appearance in my collection or listening experience. Basically, it’s just an updated glass harmonica, and the novelty wears off about three notes in. Fortunately, Kern does something with the instrument compositionally. (He also does something with it musically since he plays it.) While not the best work here, it does create a sort of, well, dreamy soundworld which works nicely enough. Stephen Koncz’s GoldBergHain, based on Kraut und Rüben, comes off as a playful, light, folk music inspired dance piece with Bach woven in just so. It delights far more than it should. Finally, Konstantia Gourzi gets three tracks for her Lullabies for Three Flowers to end the recording. I last heard Ms Gourzi played by the great William Youn and the equally great Nils Mönkemeyer. These three pieces have no attachment to Bach, so the fact that they are lullabies serves as the connection. More or less gentle, some flittering pizzicato aside, these brief, beautiful, pieces sound folk inspired and sound more pleasing than the disc of her music I listened to previously. It makes a fine, slightly incongruous end.

Overall, the collection works as intended, and Corbet, Eggert, and Rokahr emerge as names I should probably investigate some more. Sound and playing are beyond reproach, which I expect from this source.

 

[Todd A]

Big name composer. Big name (and great) conductor. That’s what I needed. So Krzysztof Penderecki’s massive Polish Requiem conducted by Antoni Wit demanded to be heard. With a Lacrimosa dedicated to Lech Wałęsa, some heavy-duty politics merge into the serious material.

And serious it is. Right from the get-go, with ominous strings and hushed chorus in the Introitus, which expands in short order, one senses a proper dark and potent Requiem will unfold over the next hour and half. Penderecki doesn’t really hold back, marshalling the massive forces to dramatic effect, and get to the Tuba mirum, and the soloist sings in a manner almost as dramatic as something out of Mussorgsky, while the strings and brass layer on thick ‘n’ heavy music. The work moves forward with several slower, less dramatic sections making one very aware of the length and scale of the work, but then along comes the Ingemisco tanquam reus, with machine gun timps and other percussion, and violent musical undulations, joined by the soloists teaming up in hyper-expressive mode, and one barely notices the time go by. The piece follows a similar dramatic pattern until the haunting and ethereal Lux aeterna, which has an extended, quiet opening in the strings and with the choir, only gradually building up. It’s arguably the most compelling minute-and-a-half of the piece. The work then follows more or less the same type of path, made more impressive by the compositional timeline, and then ends up with a dramatic Libera animas.

Rather expectedly, Pendercki’s work sort of typifies what I expected to hear from a post-war Requiem: serious, big, (maybe a little too) long, striking, astringent, and at times beautiful. It does not emerge as top five Requiem, but I will listen again.

Wit, band, and all singers do excellent work.

 

[Todd A]

Over the years, Leonardo Balada has been a reliable source of new music that I dig. As such, I have amassed fifteen recordings of his output, making him the best represented living composer in my collection. There are certain traits which appear in most of his best work of the last few decades, with the mix of older inspirations and modern techniques the main draws. He does it time and again, and it was time I tried a couple more recordings, starting with this one.

The disc opens with Caprichos No. 1 for Guitar and String Orchestra, an Homage to Federico García Lorca, from 2003. Originally scored for guitar and string quartet on commission from the Austin Classical Guitar Society, this scaled up version adds additional compositional techniques, detailed by the composer himself in the liner notes. Broadly, the music varies quite a bit, from austere, quiet, and transparent, with tunes predominating, to gnarly avant garde music with dissonant and atonal clumps o’ music tossed the listener’s way. I’m not familiar with Lorca’s original arrangements, but these seven miniatures belie their folk roots in a post-Bartokian, which is to say, Baladaian way, creating an extensive suite for guitar and string orchestra. It fits right into his oeuvre.

The Caprichos No. 5 for Cello and String Orchestra: Homage to Isaac Albéniz, from 2008, basically riffs on four pieces from Iberia (Triana, Corpus Christi en Sevilla, Evocación, El Albaicín) as well as Seville from Suite Española No. 1. One needn’t strain to hear the famous melodies played by the cellist or the band, but they are transformed, with most of the writing a delightful modernist concoction that takes small musical inspirations in new directions. How much one likes this music may depend greatly on how one likes music built on others’ works. Given the highly original output, it works very well. It is worth noting that the cellist and band are the dedicatees of the work.

A couple smaller works follow, starting with A Little Night Music in Harlem for String Orchestra, from 2006. It blends Eine kleine Nachtmusik, jazz, and a plethora of Balada’s normal compositional techniques. If that sounds like pastiche, it is, but this is high end pastiche, pastiche as high art, along the lines of BAZ or Berio. The Reflejos, for Strings and Flute is a two-movement work, with the opening movement slower and more somber, and the latter more vibrant and colorful. It’s not really a flute concerto so much as an orchestral score with flute obbligato, and it blends everything together nicely. Once one is accustomed to Balada’s style, this is more or less a light and easy piece.

Playing, conducting, and sonics are all spiffy. Another fine addition to my Balada collection.

 

[Todd A]

Saving the most radical for last, Helga Pogatschar’s Mars: Requiem ends things with a buzzsaw. Ms Pogatschar was around thirty when she wrote this and she purposely set out to write a piece commemorating the dead of WWII, and to do so in a manner that stood against the male music tradition. All well and good, though I’m not convinced that setting ancient liturgical texts is the best way to achieve that end. That written, such intense iconoclasm can lead to striking, original, vital, visceral works. (I’d write “shocking”, but art does not shock me.) So, what does a bad girl have to say about the Requiem? Well . . .

The work opens with Mars, an obvious addition to the standard text, and it stands in for the Dies Irae. Filled to the brim with synthesizers and electronic drums, along with caterwauling as opposed to singing, and all manner of crushing intensity that would make Trent Reznor perk up, it’s as non-classical a start to a Requiem as exists. The Introitus follows, and an electronically augmented bass bellows out the text, surrounded by female singers, and then the electronic bass thunders, and the (presumably) electronic music meant to evoke Byzantine chant arrives, as does a tenor. It swirls and grinds forward. The Kyrie opens with recorded German text, and then movies into more of the grinding, industrial rock meets tradition vibe. Pogatschar blends styles and voices, sometimes pairing the two high parts expertly, and she even incorporates straight-up Renaissance a capella polyphony briefly, before reintroducing thudding electronic bass. The piece then constantly weaves all these widely disparate sounds and styles, arriving at a Sanctus that includes extended droning passages that sound like hyper-aggressive minimalism. The effect is quite something, and truly unique. The Agnus Dei falls just short of the effect, as the soprano soars above everything else, with the other soloists adding color, while electronic music hums in the background and synthesized instruments approximate some type of pseudo-folk music. The concluding Qohelet blends modernized takes on ancient music with the soloist very obviously recorded in an isolated booth and then mixed in. The minimalist support compels.

This work is entirely unlike all the others, standing apart and away from any tradition. It blasts past conservative avant garde writing into something new in my experience, showing what can be done with the Requiem, and opening infinite paths forward. It blends so many influences, some separated by millennia, and keeps moving forward with almost unyielding intensity, and does so with very little concern for sounding beautiful, that it ends up a modern music drama with liturgical texts. In some ways it’s like a post-post-modern Hildegard von Bingen, taking full advantage of everything to convey a message. There’s a sense of exploration, purpose, anger, sorrow, and the composer seems to give zero ****s about how it might be received. It is bold. It is original. It is striking. It is absorbing. Now, that written, there may very well be dozens or hundreds of similar works I’ve never heard because I’ve never sought to explore this artistic nook of the contemporary world. I kinda want to look a bit more. And Ms Pogatschar deserves some more listening. To be clear, I suspect many people may hate this often outright ugly work. That’s fine. It works for me. Fantastically well.

I could not find this recording to stream on any paid service I have access to, so I went the YouTube route. Sound is therefore a bit compromised, though I get the sense it doesn’t matter. I also made it a point to listen in my 2.1 home theater the first time around, with the .1 adding to the sonic, even physical experience. The second time around I went with earbuds, and this work seems quite well suited to that delivery mechanism. It lacks weight, but it sounds claustrophobic, and the isolation allows the music to burrow into one’s ears, mind, and soul.

I must give thanks to Kees van der Vloed at the Requiem Survery website (http://www.requiemsurvey.org/), which is devoted to listing all sorts of requiems, recorded and not. The site lists over 5000 different pieces. More listening remains.

 

[Todd A]

Before picking up the Pražák Quartet big box, I had never even seen the name Jindřich Feld. A Czech composer born just about a century ago, he was born to a violin professor father and a violinist mother, studied music for decades and composed and taught. Given his parentage, it’s not entirely surprising that he wrote six string quartets. And given when and where he was born, it’s not entirely surprising that two names pop into mind when listening to the Fourth and Sixth String Quartets here: DSCH and Bartok. It’s not that Feld rips them off, it’s just that both of those composers’ styles influence Feld. There’s nothing wrong with that. For instance, Krzysztof Meyer’s writing is obviously heavily influenced by DSCH, yet Meyer writes his own music, which rises to the level of his influence. Feld does something quite similar. I’m not quite ready to write that he rises to quite the same level, but as one listens to the Fourth Quartet, hears the hints of night music, the harsh but irresistible dissonance, the at times rockin’ rhythm and the at times strikingly beautiful melodies, one can’t help but enjoy what’s on offer. The Sixth, which has some deep, rich cello playing that threatens to overwhelm the listener (yes!) and some audience noise (meh) has a drama and energy and flair that is hard to resist. Combing pizzicato with vibrato, sour singing lines, great contrasts in tempo, and some rhythmic snap, and, well, there’s more than a little to like. The Clarinet Quintet offers more string writing along the lines of what came before, and for the clarinet it sort of melds the Bartok of Contrasts with a Schoenbergian vision of Brahms, so it’s all very, very good. Since this work is still fairly new, it may yet become a repertoire staple.


Feld kind of got lucky in that the Pražák took up his case. One is assured of world class playing. Sound is close and immediate. Maybe a little too much. Overall, a superb recording of some very fine music.

 

[Todd A]

It’s been a good long while since I last listened to something by Tan Dun, and I figured it was about time that I try some of his solo piano music.

The recording opens with Eight Memories in Watercolor, in its 2002 revision. The short piece, clocking in at just over fifteen minutes, is made up of eight miniatures. The opening notes of Missing Moon immediately evoke two names: Claude Debussy and Federico Mompou. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, there’s a lot right with it. Since this is the revised version, I don’t know what changes were made to the 1978 score, but simplicity and creative harmonic writing pervade the work, and Dun adds his own voice and what sound like abstracted Chinese musical elements. The apogee of the set is Floating Clouds, which takes all the traits to their highest level of refinement. (There’s commentary from Dun available online about how much he admired a performance of this piece by Lang Lang.) While Raat plays very nicely, the piano sounds a bit bright and brittle, so I must dream of a Bohzhanov or Volodos or Kosuge performance. And I suppose Lang Lang.

While the opening work sounds quite nice and certainly has pieces that can and should provide encores for contemporary pianists, C-A-G-E (In Memory of John Cage) offers more. At just shy of thirteen minutes, this work evokes John Cage’s work for prepared piano, with plucking and strumming and preparation aplenty, generating at times entirely unpianistic sounds verging on true gamelan music. It sounds unambiguously Chinese in places, and unabashedly modernist in others. It has real musical meat on the bone. Film Music Sonata, from 2016, reworks the score for the film The Banquet. I’ve not seen the film, so I don’t know the music, but this work combines more formal rigor and what seems like it could be modernist programmatic music into a suite-sonata hybrid. The short Traces, which contains as much silence and sustain as musical notes, sounds like a Mompou-Ligeti hybrid, which means it’s most excellent.

The last two works date all the way back to 2020. The first, The Fire, written for Raat, starts off slow and hazy, with the pianist plinking out notes while keeping the sustain busy. It very quickly morphs into harsh, staccato heavy modernism to rival nearly any composition. Hazy beauty returns near the middle, but sounds musically distorted, to excellent effect. The music then veers to powerful, note-laden writing before morphing again into zippy note spinning, with a delightful bass ostinato for a brief period. It’s quite a fine piece. The brief Blue Orchid closes things out, and it’s a variation of Beethoven’s Diabellis. Slow and somber, it’s hard to readily identify any link to the main work, but that’s OK, it works as a nice closer.

I didn’t really have any expectations going in, so I am happy to report that C-A-G-E (In Memory of John Cage) and Traces emerge as modern piano works worthy of more attention and recordings, and The Fire as well. Playing is fine and sound is fine, too.

 

[Todd A]

Leonardo Balada’s orchestral works often include some of his best writing, and so it was with some excitement that I finally plumped for this recording of the Sixth Symphony (2005), the Steel Symphony 1972), and the Concerto for Three Cellos (2006)! The recording opens with the Sixth Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrows, dedicated to the victims of the Spanish Civil War. In this, it shares a theme with one of Balada’s greatest works, Guernica. The opening section of the single movement work is all intensity, vitality and anger. Tuttis pulsate, rhythm drives the musical mass forward. Not until about a third of the way in does anything that sounds sorrowful arrive, and it is beautiful and affecting, but it quickly gives way to another intense bout of musical outpouring, before returning to slow music. The transitions are quick and masterful. Some vibrant military marching morphs into a near orchestral galop, and then into a fearsome string onslaught, again via swift, masterful transitions. Jesús López-Cobos extracts fine playing from the Jesús López-Cobos. It’s a heckuva way to open a recording.

The Concerto for Three Cellos, which counts Michael Sanderling as one of the cellists, is titled A German Concerto, and celebrates Germany’s reconstruction after the two world wars. Unabashedly avant garde, one needn’t wait but for a few seconds before hearing what three cellos playing in unison up high sounds like, and then in tandem at different registers, and so on. It’s something new. The surrounding orchestral music has some punchy, sometimes aggressive music swirling about, some thundering bass drum thwacks, piano interjections, squawking brass. A German tune permeates the work, and some folk-like music, colorful percussion, and other nice touches pop up, as does a three cello solo. Some outright romantic flourishes appear as well, with an almost Korngoldian touch, and the piece has a celebratory field. It’s another unique work from the composer. Eivind Jensen leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in a fine performance.

The recording closes with the Steel Symphony, an homage to Steel Workers in an early 70s avant garde style. The piece opens with an extended passage that sounds like the orchestra tuning itself, and only slowly morphs into a variant of a boom-clang avant garde work. Ample brass blatting, eerie string figurations, bizarre percussion outbursts, repeated sections, and so forth created a chaotic yet purposeful soundworld. It’s not awful, but it’s nowhere near as good as the first two works, either of which I would dig seeing in person. (But come on, how many times will three cellists perform together?) Jesús López-Cobos gets solid playing from the Barcelona band.

Yet another winner overall from Balada.

 

[darkstarcrashes]

Before picking up the Pražák Quartet big box, I had never even seen the name Jindřich Feld. A Czech composer born just about a century ago, he was born to a violin professor father and a violinist mother, studied music for decades and composed and taught. Given his parentage, it’s not entirely surprising that he wrote six string quartets. And given when and where he was born, it’s not entirely surprising that two names pop into mind when listening to the Fourth and Sixth String Quartets here: DSCH and Bartok. It’s not that Feld rips them off, it’s just that both of those composers’ styles influence Feld. There’s nothing wrong with that. For instance, Krzysztof Meyer’s writing is obviously heavily influenced by DSCH, yet Meyer writes his own music, which rises to the level of his influence. Feld does something quite similar. I’m not quite ready to write that he rises to quite the same level, but as one listens to the Fourth Quartet, hears the hints of night music, the harsh but irresistible dissonance, the at times rockin’ rhythm and the at times strikingly beautiful melodies, one can’t help but enjoy what’s on offer. The Sixth, which has some deep, rich cello playing that threatens to overwhelm the listener (yes!) and some audience noise (meh) has a drama and energy and flair that is hard to resist. Combing pizzicato with vibrato, sour singing lines, great contrasts in tempo, and some rhythmic snap, and, well, there’s more than a little to like. The Clarinet Quintet offers more string writing along the lines of what came before, and for the clarinet it sort of melds the Bartok of Contrasts with a Schoenbergian vision of Brahms, so it’s all very, very good. Since this work is still fairly new, it may yet become a repertoire staple.


Feld kind of got lucky in that the Pražák took up his case. One is assured of world class playing. Sound is close and immediate. Maybe a little too much. Overall, a superb recording of some very fine music.

Thanks for the write-up, on the strength of which I picked up a copy of this from my local secondhand CD and record shop (Hillside Harmonies) the other day. As you say, some great music very well played and recorded. Prior to this I'd never heard of Feld.

 

[Todd A]

For no particular reason, I decided I wanted to listen to a big ol’ slug of new religious music from different eras, though with a heavy concentration on the Renaissance. (‘Tis my favored era for such music.) Unlike the last time I had a similar hankerin’, listening will not be limited to Requiems. Once again, I decided to rely on Naxos for a goodly chunk of the music since recordings can still be had for a pittance when sales happen. Also. I have found that Jeremy Summerly and his normal crew tend to be quite reliable sources of lovely recordings, so they will appear.

Writing of Mr Summerly, a hot off the press, 2024 release of music by written by Philip Stopford between 2016 and 2022 kicks things off. The shortest possible review: Steven Spielberg would reject the music as too trite and treacly. The music actually annoys as the recording unfolds. The melodies blend show tunes and feel-good Hollywood schlock into a saccharine mess. Too, the star soprano does not generate a particularly appealing sound. The cymbals make the listener wonder just what the heck is going on. (This is sacred music, after all. Right?) For the most part, the Missa Deus Nobiscum and all the smaller works sort of all sound like a treacly, annoying musical blob. It’s not until the closer, God is Our Hope and Strength, where the music tips over into outright awfulness, with horns, organs, and electric piano generating noise that nearly causes the annoyance to morph into mild anger. Thankfully, it lasts only six little eternities, er, minutes.

The plusses here are limited to the up to snuff modern recording quality, fine instrumental playing, nice organ playing, and generally fine choral singing.

A big ol’ whiff.

 

[Todd A]

My first recording devoted solely to the music of Jacob Obrecht comes next. (I have heard some Obrecht, but in collections only.) A couple Salve Reginas, a Venit ad Petrum, and the forty-five minute Missa Caput make up the disc. It is very lovely and at times affecting. It lacks the mind-bending polyphonic goodness of someone like Morales or the arresting austerity of someone like Rore, but the directness works well. And the women’s voices, often overpowering the lower voices, works extra well for me. A very fine recording.

 

[Todd A]

Carlo Gesualdo is my favorite murderous fiend of a composer, and I am very familiar with his Madrigals, having amassed three sets. I also picked up the mammoth Responsoria a decade ago, as recorded by the Glossa folks, so I am familiar with what he does when the subject is religious. Here is his five voice sacred music, and basically it is just shy of seventy minutes worth of beautiful, austere, deadly serious music. It lacks the daring of his later madrigals, but it’s devotion is obvious. Nice singing, decent recording, and a most pleasant listening experience.